NEW KIND OF NORMALITY

ETH Studio Basel, an institute of urban research, where you taught until recently as head of research undertakes projects that explore the evolution of the contemporary city. The Studio Basel maintains a research program on processes of urban transformation on an international scale, that focused for example on the urbanization process on the seven Canary Islands, the development of the tri-national region of MetroBasel (Switzerland, France, Germany), and on cities such as Havana, Nairobi, Casablanca or Hong Kong. What is so specific, speaking in global terms, about the city of Belgrade that the Studio Basel started a research on its urban transformations? Where does Belgrade position itself nowadays in the European framework of capital cities?

Milica Topalović: For several years, the focus of Studio Basel investigations has been the idea of “specificity.” Certainly, globalization has come to be the common denominator of urbanization processes worldwide, but does that mean that cities are becoming ever more similar and more generic? At the Studio Basel we assumed the opposite: cities respond to emerging global patterns by developing their own strategies and asserting their own identity. Thus, specificity is not the opposite of global urbanism, it is an integral part of it.
The investigations on international cities we carried out under the umbrella of specificity gave the possibility of comparison. Unlike most European cities, Belgrade is now approaching its European profile through an experience of rapid and largely informal development that reminds of cities of the Global South rather than of the North. However, parallels with Western neoliberal deregulation are apparent as well: Belgrade is specific, but not isolated case.

Belgrade - Formal/Informal presents the results of the Studio Basel's research that investigated in particular the city's development from the times of the international embargo against the Milosevic-regime. The conclusions on urban development of the city are presented in a dialectical pair of “formal” and “informal” concepts that find remarkable reflections in the plan of the city. Can you explain this further? What lies behind Belgrade’s apparently bipolar growth?

Milica Topalović: The transformation unleashed in the early 1990s in Belgrade included the withdrawal, and even the complete loss of influence of state institutions in urban development. The collapse of urban functions previously held by the state including commerce, housing construction, and public transport, reflected in eruption of informal practices as form of compensation. In other words, within a very short time, the whole system of checks and balances that had maintained equilibrium between the public and private in the modern socialist city were quickly sidelined and replaced by more indeterminate and vague systems of rules, that are informal and shifted entirely into the private sphere. To characterize these processes, we used the linked theoretical fields, the “formal” and “informal.” But they are not taken as binary opposites – the either-or. We have learnt that informal systems are not independent, but are always linked to formal structures – the state, the legal framework, and the urban planning.

Informality does not necessarily mean complete illegality. The undermining of traditional urban forms brings forth new, flexible regulatory systems that have nothing to do with building codes or master plans. But, despite their illegal status such neighborhoods tend to adopt the regular and even conventional features of the state defined urban programs that preceded them. What led to the development of such strategies?

Milica Topalović: Indeed, informality in Belgrade does not correspond with the widespread perception of informality as the Third World phenomenon. These areas are not precarious and don’t remind of slums, favelas, bidonvilles, or even of Roma settlements, which actually present the only example of “classical informality” found in the city. Informality in Belgrade has not been a phenomenon of social margin, but of the entire social spectrum, including the middle class and the elites. This special brand of European middle class informality found in Belgrade expresses itself through a wish for order, uniformity, and a kind of normality. Even in its standards it comes close to a regular, European type of urban development.
Further, the phenomenon we have called “stability of the informal” refers to the fact that informal construction is still ongoing, more than a decade after Milosevic’s departure. Instead of withdrawal, informality has achieved the opposite: it has provoked a gradual transformation of institutions and accommodations from the law, a process now leading attempts of comprehensive legalization. For example, with the incomplete legal and regulatory apparatus in transitional conditions, it has been cheaper and faster to build informally and to await legalization. In such situation, informality had clear political benefits, the incentives to change were lacking.

Remarkably, already fifty years have passed since the last overarching urban plans and concepts for New Belgrade were created. In the intervening years the area developed erratically, showing instability of the modern paradigm. The promise of public space with buildings for the government, business and modern urban life in New Belgrade was not fulfilled. Is it possible, to reinforce and refine the qualities of modern urbanism in contemporary Belgrade, by overcoming the irrational indifference towards socialist and modern inheritance?

Milica Topalović: In the past two decades, in tandem with the breakdown of the socialist state, New Belgrade as a modernist urban vision has been abandoned. Examples such as the CK tower have revealed the ambivalence and complexity in relationship to the XX century past: the Tower, that would have been one of modern architectures most important monuments in Belgrade, was reshaped beyond recognition due to its association with Titoist and nationalist ideologies. More broadly, what socialism was about and how properly to appraise socialist practices and products is an open question; a contemporary reassessment is ongoing. The inheritance of socialist architecture and urbanism is not an exception.
Additionally, the role of urban planning has diminished dramatically in the post socialist period. In New Belgrade, we de facto had the practice of investment centered decision-making, the so-called “investors urbanism”, focused on highly visible individual projects (“the largest arena”, “the biggest shopping mall”) instead of urban space and the city. I believe that revisiting and reinforcing the qualities of modern urbanism in Belgrade would be possible in the future only with a stronger and more publicly oriented form of planning.

Master Plan of Belgrade to 2021 designated New Belgrade’s central zone a top priority location in the planned conversion of the capital into a commercial hub – widely criticized for displaying signs of corruption and a favoring of private interests. The end result of the Studio’s research is a new type of map, entitled Master Plan of Reality. As a systematic reading of Belgrade’s urban figure, the map does not reflect visions of urban planners, it is not a zoning plan, but a snapshot of a given urban reality. How can it contribute to an understanding of the “new kind of normality” between formal and informal concepts, but furthermore to a vision of Belgrade with renewed commitment to the city?

Milica Topalović: We asked ourselves: “What has Belgrade become, or what is it becoming, after two decades of growth and transformation in the post socialist context? Do the processes of transformation have a spatial and geographical form, do they show with clarity in the map of the city?” We found it remarkable that the consequence of what was widely regarded as chaotic, unstructured and unplanned growth is still an explicit and identifiable urban configuration. Belgrade is quite literally a collage city, grown and composed from historically very different parts: Ottoman Old Belgrade and Habsburg Zemun were joined via the socialist modern New Belgrade in the middle; now, all are surrounded by the post socialist informal belt. During socialism, people had difficulties in accepting New Belgrade as part of Belgrade; today the same is true of informal settlements. The prevailing perception of what the city is, has not caught up with the speed and reality of transformations. Our new map constitutes the proposal for radical acceptance of what is there, as basis for the new idea of the city: thus, the Masterplan of Reality.